Is Pelosi backing off truth commission for Bush-era torture?

Sounds like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is backing off her desire to have a “truth commission” investigate the use of torture on terrorism suspects during the Bush administration. Or maybe she’s realizing that she’s getting outmuscled by President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (who don’t want one) on this.

Listen … er, read … her conversation with Candy Crowley on CNN a little while ago:

Pelosi: “It’s pretty clear — the president has been pretty clear that he doesn’t want any truth commission on torture, and so has Harry Reid, so the attention to that will probably be done in a more regular-order way by the committees in the House and in the Senate. So, that is the normal course of action.”

PELOSI: “Well, you know, it’s that there — it’s not a question of letting it go, the president has revealed that the release of the memos and the rest has revealed a great deal of information already.

“I understand that more will follow coming from the Justice Department in terms of the Office of Professional Conduct. And so we’ll see what that is. So my focus now would be on a — if we’re going to have a commission, to have one, as I have suggested, weeks ago, on how the economic collapse occurred and how we can prevent it from not happening again.”

Crowley pressed Pelosi on her reactions when she was privvy to private briefings on torture. Pelosi said she didn’t have many options, given that she is bound to secrecy. “Because for some reason the Republicans, while I am barred from talking about what goes on in meetings and I could be charged for revealing classified information, they seem to feel at liberty to talk about everything that went on at every meeting as they saw it.”

Crowley: “Inside that meeting, you could have said, this is unacceptable to me, I don’t care what your legal people are telling you, we should not …

PELOSI: And to what end? To what end? No, we’re not — they didn’t say they were doing it. But you know what, I’m not getting into that. The fact is, is that I know what they told us and I know that they did not share our values.

“So any briefing that you would get from the Bush administration on the subject is one that is probably something you’re not going to agree with, and two, maybe not the whole truth anyway.

“So what you have to do is say, how can I change this, if that’s your point. How can I change this? I can change this by changing the people who are making these decisions. If I can’t change the election, which we didn’t do in the next election, but we did now, we can change who can share this information.

“And at long last we have a Democratic majority in the House, Democratic president of the United States, who do not want to have politics involved in intelligence-gathering.”